Month: January 2012

Doesn’t it annoy you when you get an @user reply from an account that is simply scouring the public twitter feed for key words to then send you their rubbish. Well over the past few days I’ve flagged about 23 accounts as being a spammer.

So I’ve changed my account to now be private, this is not a practical solution as I would much rather stick with using a public feed.

This almost makes using Twitter a non event, but for now that’s the way it’s going to be… 😐

Like this:

Ok so if you recognise the critter in this image then your half way to understanding what I’m talking about! Port 70 is traditionally reserved for the Gopher protocol. What is Gopher? Well it’s a slim text only layout that pre dates the internet as we know it as (aka HTML)

Gopher started life back in 1991 and lost popularity in the mid 1990’s in favour to HTML (port 80) Just recently I have rediscovered Gopher and so have a group of friends (identi.ca, StatusNet)

I’m hosting a Gopher service using Pygopherd. This has the advantage of serving both Gopher & HTML simultaneously. This means that you can point your browser at vk7hse.org:70 and view using HTML then if you have the Overbite plugin installed for your browser you can then switch to Gopher.

Like this:

Ok so if you recognise the critter in this image then your half way to understanding what I’m talking about! Port 70 is traditionally reserved for the Gopher protocol. What is Gopher? Well it’s a slim text only layout that pre dates the internet as we know it as (aka HTML)

Gopher started life back in 1991 and lost popularity in the mid 1990’s in favour to HTML (port 80) Just recently I have rediscovered Gopher and so have a group of friends (identi.ca, StatusNet)

I’m hosting a Gopher service using Pygopherd. This has the advantage of serving both Gopher & HTML simultaneously. This means that you can point your browser at vk7hse.org:70 and view using HTML then if you have the Overbite plugin installed for your browser you can then switch to Gopher.

Like this:

Since around September last year when Identi.ca was updated to the much-anticipated Status.net 1.0 it has suffered from many outages causing some people to focus on either abandoning identi.ca or hosting their own Status.net instance. At first I wasn’t overly bothered on hosting my instance, but some time back I did setup a test instance of Statusnet version 0.93 but decided at that it wasn’t necessary for me to simply duplicate the service of identi.ca (that I was using fairly regularly at that time)

In recent weeks I had decided to spend some more time again on identi.ca, but most of the time when I went to post notices I was having some trouble with Mustard (Android Status.net/Identi.ca/Twitter client) but it simply turned out that identi.ca was down! So I wanted to make sure that Mustard was ok with Statusnet 1.0 so the only way to test that for me was to simply setup a setup an instance and well that led me to keep it going once I’d finished the test!

Here’s a copy of my config.php (sensitive data removed!) for reference on how my instance is configured…

Don’t be alarmed by seeing the section commented out (hence the double //) I noticed that I had duplicate listings for plugins so I commented them out. I hope that seeing this configuration helps you out should you wish to setup your own Statusnet instance.

Like this:

HTC have made available (finally) the official unlocked bootloader via the htcdev.com site. OK so the HTC Desire is a fairly easy phone to hack and replace the locked bootloader using alpharev and to install root access using reflash. The new replacement for these tools is revolutionary, this simply combined the two tools into the one.

So the latter of the above is the unofficial way and for most (including myself) have used to replace the locked bootloader, however now the tool from htcdev site gives you a link to download a replacement bootloader (that is locked at this point) Now this is where for me the expectations from the bootloader program didn’t agree with both the version of hboot and current android version.

The bootloader program (naturally only runs under MS Windows) that you download from htcdev you need to select your carrier and the firmware update number (froyo)

So here’s the catch, the RUU that you download is expecting to see the release of hboot that came with the official froyo update. So if you have any other hboot version then you are going to get an error stating that this update doesn’t support the release (number) and that an update will be released soon. Clearly the latter is untrue! but then I suppose it’s better than simply being told nothing! So it’s essential to restore the hboot version that is included with froyo. It’s also necessary to roll back to the official froyo release (don’t worry you can remove it once you’re done)

Once you have restored froyo you can go ahead and run the RUU to replace the hboot version (yes again!) It’s now that you can follow the instructions on htcdev to unlock the bootloader!

Ok so I decided to go down this path of using the official unlocked bootloader, however in all honesty it’s far easier to use the alpharev bootloader!

Like this:

Back in December 2010 I applied to become part of the T2 server network. It’s now just a little over a year since then and for me I believe that it was a good decision to pursue. At the time of applying there was only two T2 servers located in Australia, they being T2AUST & T2SYDNEY. Now just a year on and there’s now 5. This has certainly improved the user experience within AU as this provides some more redundancy to the network.

Like this:

Well although I’m not as active as I once was on Identi.ca I’ve decided to set up my StatusNet instance (again!) on this server. OK you just saw that “again” in brackets what’s with that? Well a while back I attempted to do a similar thing but failed due to my inadequateness to make sense of some of the basics to make your own instance talk to others via Oauth. Well after some help from a few peeps on the !feds group I now have all that sorted (rather easy really I just was not making sense of the docs AGAIN!)

So at this stage this is purely for my own purposes, meaning that I’ve no likely intention to open it up for user registration (aka Identi.ca/StatusNet)

Ok now you can bet that the recent amount of downtime that Identi.ca has experienced will have been fixed and all of this will have been for nothing! but maybe not because this time round I’ve learnt something! 🙂

Update: I’ve recently deleted my account on identi.ca in preference to using my own setup!